Saturday, December 15, 2007

Mme. Mao's suicide

On my last evening in China, I finished reading The White-Boned Demon. I was amazed to discover that Jiang Ching actually wasn't in prison when she hanged herself, but in a "treatment apartment". Ross Terrill writes: "Toward 3.00 a.m. a weak and depressed Jiang crept from her bedroom to the bathroom and with several handkerchiefs fashioned a noose and tied it to an iron frame above the bathtub... At 3.30 a.m. a nurse came in and found her suspended above the bathtub." This is amazing, given that when we created Dis-Orientations we had no idea that there was a bathtub anywhere near when Mme. Mao died. And yet the image we found was of her hanging herself at the same time as Alex prepared her own fatal bath. Spooky or what?

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